Midnight Oil Redneck Wonderland

A snapshot of pre-millennial Australia, Midnight Oil’s 10th album captured the national mood like a mosquito in amber—warning against encroaching xenophobia and suburban complacency, and predicting how the country’s culture would devolve over the coming decades. Many of the tracks here debuted during the band’s tour in support of 1997 best-of 20,000 Watt RSL, bringing a renewed intensity to both the message and the music with techno-inflected propulsion underscoring their usual sound. Within a decade of Redneck Wonderland’s 1998 release, frontman Peter Garrett would become a Federal Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts. This album is as good a policy agenda as anything coming out of Canberra—and far more likely to get blood pumping.